Grâce has the same Latin root as the Spanish gracias and the Italian grazie, which both mean "thanks." It's also the source of the English word "grace." Like "grace," la grâce (don't forget the circumflex) can mean "elegance," "pardon," and "mercy":

As you might have guessed, "mercy" is the literal meaning of merci. So when you say "thank you" in French, you're really saying "mercy." And when you say "thanks to" something or someone, you're really saying "grace"!

There are a few different ways of saying "when" in French, the most basic of which is quand. Like "when," quand can either be an adverb or a conjunction. As an adverb, it's generally used to form questions:

De nouveau and à nouveau both mean "again" (or more literally, "anew"), and you'll often find them used interchangeably in everyday speech. But technically there's a subtle difference between them. De nouveau implies a repetition of something that already happened:

Je ne comprends pas. Pourriez-vous m'expliquer à nouveau? I don't understand. Could you explain it to me again [in a different way]?

Do you see the difference between the second sentences in the examples above? If you don't hear something someone said, you want them to repeat it. So you use de nouveau. But if you don't understand what they said, you want them to rephrase it, say it in a new way. So you use à nouveau.

Note that both these expressions only use nouveau, not the other forms of the adjective (nouvel, nouveaux, nouvelle, nouvelles). If you see any of these after de, you're dealing with "new," not "again":

We've touched on grammatical agreement in previous lessons, but in this one we're focusing on the word "agreement" itself. The French word for "agreement" is un accord, and its verbal form, accorder, means "to agree" or "to make an agreement":

Une limite is "a limit," but limite can also be an adverb or adjective. As an adverb (which is how Sophie uses it here), limite is a more informal synonym of presque (almost, nearly). So Sophie could also have said:

J'ai presque léché l'assiette, quoi! I almost licked the plate, you know!

Tu pourrais presque mettre un tout petit peu de miel, hein? You could almost put in a tiny little bit of honey, right?

In the first example, she could also have used the expression "avoir failli + infinitive" (to almost do something):

J'ai faillilécher l'assiette, quoi! I almostlicked the plate, you know!

But let's get back to limite. As an adjective, it usually means "maximum," as in la vitesse limite (maximum speed) or le prix limite (maximum price, upper price limit). You'll also see it in phrases like la date limite (deadline) or la date limite de vente (sell-by date).

More colloquially, limite can describe a close call, something you just barely succeeded in doing:

When it comes to writing numbers in French, there are a good number (bon nombre) of rules to remember. Luckily, Sophie and Patrice have broken down most of them in their latest video series. They pay particular attention to the rules concerning the numeral one (un), the eighties (quatre-vingts), and the hundreds (cents).

In French, there’s only one numeral that changes according to the gender of the noun it modifies: the numeral one!

Je n’ai acheté qu’une chemise et un pantalon.

I only bought one [feminine] shirt and one [masculine] pair of pants.

This rule applies to any number ending in “one,” such as vingt-et-un (“twenty-one,” masculine) or vingt-et-une (“twenty-one,” feminine):

Most other numbers—from deux (two) to quarante (forty) to deux mille quarante (two thousand forty)—never change in any situation. For those that do (besides those ending in un), it’s generally a question of knowing when to add an -s at the end. Take the number quatre-vingts (eighty) for example. Quatre-vingts literally means “four twenties” (4 x 20 = 80) and always takes an -s, except—once again—after a noun indicating a number. So we would write: la page quatre-vingt (page eighty) and les années quatre-vingt (the nineteen eighties), but quatre-vingts pages (eighty pages) and quatre-vingts années (eighty years).

The -s is also dropped whenever quatre-vingts is followed by a number—as in quatre-vingt-un (eighty-one) or quatre-vingt-cinq (eighty-five):

So we would write: trois cents (three hundred), la page trois cent (page three hundred), trois cent un (three hundred one; nottrois cent et un!). For more on cent, and numbers like mille (thousand) and million (million), see our lesson on big numbers in French.

If your head is spinning from all these number rules, don’t fret! It’s easier to just memorize numbers like soixante-quinze and quatre-vingt-onze rather than having to calculate 60 + 15 and 4 x 20 + 11 each time you want to say "seventy-five" and "ninety-one."

Since France has such a rich artistic history, from Gothic architecture to Surrealism and beyond, it's not too surprising that there are three different words for "painting" in French. You'll find one of them in our new video on the artist Karine Rougier:

So la peinture à l'huile, for example, can either mean "oil painting" or "oil paint."

In English, a "tableau" is an artistic grouping or arrangement, originally referring to a motionless group of people representing a scene or historical event, kind of like a living painting. As a matter of fact, "tableau" is short for tableau vivant, which means exactly that. Un tableau (literally, "little table") is another word for "painting" in French:

The galette des rois (kings' cake) is a holiday treat prepared throughout the French-speaking world. Associated with the feast of Epiphany on January 6, the cake contains a small figurine (called la fève) representing the baby Jesus. Whoever finds la fève in their slice is crowned king or queen for the day.

Patricia explains the tradition of the galette des rois in her latest video. While doing so, she also happens to use the verb tirer in all three of its major senses:

"To pull" is the most basic meaning of tirer. You'll often come across it when approaching a door (tirez, "pull"), along with its opposite (poussez, "push"). And in the event of an emergency, you might tirer l'alarme incendie (pull the fire alarm).

Tirer means "to draw" not in the sense of "drawing" a picture (the verb for that is dessiner), but rather "drawing" something toward you or extracting something (such as la fève from a galette des rois). It's also "to draw" as in "to pick" or "select." For example, a French magician might say to you:

Tirez une carte. Pick a card.

Tirer's more sinister meaning is "to shoot" or "to fire," referring to a weapon. This also has to do with pulling—you pull the trigger to fire a gun and pull the bow to shoot an arrow. Be careful with your prepositions here: we say "to shoot or fire at" in English, but in French it's not tirer à but tirersur(tirer des fléchettes sur le roi).

Tirer has many, many other meanings. For instance, you can use it to describe skin irritation (which, if you think about it, kind of feels like your skin is being pulled):

J'ai la peau qui tire. My skin is irritated.

On a totally different note, tirer can also refer to printing something, such as a book, a photo, or a poster. In this case it's synonymous with imprimer:

On a tiré [or imprimé] des affiches pour le concert. We printed some posters for the concert.

Note that there are two noun forms of tirer: le tirage and le tir. Tir exclusively refers to "shooting" or "firing" a weapon, as in le tir à l'arc (archery). Tirage refers to "drawing" or "printing," as in le tirage au sort (drawing lots) or le tirage d'un livre (the printing of a book).

Moinsis a comparative word meaning "less" or "least" (its opposite, plus, means "more" or "most"). In this lesson, we'll focus on two common expressions with moins, au moins and du moins, both equivalent to "at least." How do we know when to use which?

If you think about it, "at least" has (at least!) three usages. It can specify the minimum amount of something ("I need at least two cups of coffee every day"), it can emphasize a positive aspect of an otherwise negative situation ("The car was totaled, but at least we're all OK"), and it can alter the connotation of a previous statement ("That restaurant is terrible. At least that's what I've heard"). In general, au moins corresponds to the first two usages, and du moins to the third.

We use au moins when referring to a minimum amount. It's often followed by a number:

The verb plaire is most often used in the expressions s'il vous plaît (formal) and s'il te plaît (informal), which, as you probably know, both mean "please"––or more accurately, "if it pleases you." "To please" is the basic meaning of plaire:

We could certainly translate the above examples as "another work that pleases/appeals to me a lot," "OK, I'm not pleasing/appealing to you," and "that book is pleasing/appealing to everyone." But plaire is used a bit more generally than "to please," so you'll usually see it translated as "to like" or "enjoy" with the subject and object inverted (ce livre plaît à tout le monde = everyone enjoys thatbook). Note that plaire always takes an indirect object (plaire à quelqu'un, "to please/be pleasing to someone").

When plaire is reflexive (se plaire, literally "to please oneself"), it means "to be happy" or "to enjoy being somewhere":

In our latest Le saviez-vous? video, we visit La Maison de l'Olive, a store in Nice specializing in—you guessed it—olives. Like most of the Mediterranean region, the south of France is filled with olive trees, or oliviers:

You might be familiar with the word olivier as a proper noun, Olivier, the French equivalent of "Oliver." But its basic meaning is "olive tree." In fact, like olivier, the names of most fruit and nut trees end in -ier in French. So, for example, an apple tree is un pommier (from une pomme), a cherry tree is un cerisier (from une cerise), a pear tree is un poirier (from une poire), and so on:

Of course, there are some exceptions. A few of these tree names end in -yer, not -ier, such as cacaoyer above and noyer (walnut tree, from une noix). And a few just end in -er, namely oranger (orange tree) and pêcher (peach tree). Like most -er words, these trees are always masculine, even if the fruit or nut that grows on them is feminine. So you have un pêcher (a peach tree) but une pêche (a peach); un cerisier (a cherry tree) but une cerise (a cherry).

Incidentally, when someone asks if you know how to faire le poirier, they're not wondering whether you can "make the pear tree," but whether you can do a headstand! The origin of this expression probably has to do with the rough resemblance between a headstand and a pear tree. But why not unpommier or uncitronnier (a lemon tree)? Who knows!

A group of fruit or nut trees is a grove (un bosquet) or an orchard (un verger). But the French word for "olive grove" is not un bosquet d'oliviers. It's une oliveraie:

The word "decline" can mean "decrease," "deteriorate," "move downward," or "politely refuse." Its source, the French verb décliner, can have all of these meanings and more.

Most of these other meanings stem from a more specialized grammatical one. To "decline" a noun, pronoun, or adjective is to list all of its forms according to case, number, and gender. You don't have to worry about doing this in French—it only applies to certain languages, such as Latin and Ancient Greek. But décliner can refer to a similar activity of enumerating, presenting something in various forms, offering a range of something, laying out all its different facets.

Because décliner has such a wide variety of meanings, its translation is highly context-specific. For example, you can use it to talk about a fashion designer "presenting" all the styles of his latest collection on the runway:

The literal translation of tu m'étonnes is "you surprise me," but it's often used as a set phrase meaning "you're not kidding," "no kidding," or "tell me something I don't know." Used in this way, it has the opposite meaning of its literal translation—the person is not surprised by what they just heard. Tu m'étonnes is very similar to the English expression "surprise, surprise," which is also used ironically to convey a lack of surprise.

Sans blague is another phrase meaning "no kidding" or, more literally, "no joke." This one, however, can express surprise:

Je suis né le 3 novembre. -Sans blague! Moi aussi! I was born on November 3. -No kidding! So was I!

The verb étonner has the same root as the English verb "to stun." It means "to surprise," "astonish," or "amaze":

In early 2018, a group of protesters gathered in front of the headquarters of the SNCF (Société nationale des chemins de fer français [French National Railway Company]) to demand that the company convert its empty buildings into public housing:

Propriétaire is also the word for "owner." Un propriétaire foncier is a property owner, such as the SNCF:

Faut quand même savoir que la SNCF, c'est le deuxième propriétairefoncier du pays après l'État. You should know, however, that the SNCF is the second largest propertyowner in the country after the State. Cap. 42-44, Actus Quartier - Devant la SNCF

You'll find two words for "building" in this video—immeuble and bâtiment:

In this lesson, we're going to discuss a very common word that isn't very specific. It's un truc, an informal word for "thing" (une chose has the same meaning). You can use it when you're not quite sure what an object is called:

When someone says "it's not my thing," they're saying they don't really like it (it's not their cup of tea) or they're not really good at it (it's not their forte). There's an exact cognate of this expression in French—ce n'est pas mon truc:

The word rendez-vous is the second-person plural imperative form of the verb se rendre ("to go" or "to present oneself"). It literally means "go!" or "present yourself!" But rather than a command, you'll hear it most often used as a noun—un rendez-vous. In English, "a rendezvous" is another word for "a meeting." Un rendez-vous means that and much more, as you'll see in this lesson.

If you're a regular Yabla French user, you'll recognize this word from the final caption of nearly every video in our Voyage en France series:

Donner rendez-vous à (literally, "to give meeting to") is to arrange to meet someone, to set up a date or an appointment with someone. Indeed, besides "a meeting," un rendez-vous can also be "a date" or "an appointment":

Note the discrepancy between the French and the English in that last example: when talking about having an appointment with someone, you don't have to say j'ai un rendez-vous. J'ai rendez-vous will suffice.

In French, you don't "make" an appointment with someone—you "take" (prendre) one:

The sun is "at the meeting" for this new episode—in other words, the sun is out. Être au rendez-vous means "to be present." The expression is used in the negative in Part 1 of Le Jour où tout a basculé - J'ai piégé mon fan to describe an actress's lack of success in recent years:

mais aussi, de ne pas passerpour un psychopathe. Mastering synonyms will therefore allow you to broaden your vocabulary, but also to not be taken for a psychopath. Cap. 23-24, Le saviez-vous? - Les synonymes

As passer is such a versatile verb, it's no surprise that it's used in many, many common expressions. We'll pass along a handful of them to you:

passer à autre chose - to move on to something elsepasser à l'acte - to take actionpasser à la caisse - to pay/checkoutpasser à la télévision - to be on TVpasser à table - to sit down for a meal (also has the figurative meaning "to snitch" or "spill the beans")passer un coup de fil - to make a phone callpasser de la musique - to put on some musicpasser au bloc - to go under the knife/have surgerypasser au peigne fin - to go over with a fine-tooth combpasser à côté de - to miss/miss out onlaisser passer sa chance - to miss one's chance